Government Intelligence Makes Exact Estimate

Dear Children:

After having lived a while, most people learn to hold and accept opposing ideas in their heads at the same time. It’s not a skill, really. It’s more like a coping mechanism. There are way too many perfectly acceptable opposing ideas abroad in the land.

White light’s constituency is millions of colors. Make an untidy mess with more than three crayolas. Pay attention in school and you will learn valuable information. Pay that attention; you’re likely to miss valuable information in a text message about that skank of a chem partner. God is all-powerful but couldn’t be bothered to get the cutest nose on the most deserving adolescent. Bullies never get anything except all the lunch money. There are teachers who don’t like kids.

There are even terms like oxymoron, incongruity, conundrum, paradox, anomaly, SIDS, collateral damage and others that put a name to facelessness. Kids with little power and strong convictions like you know whereof I speak even though we don’t use such words in our everyday speech.

But then, as I said, we learn to embrace situations that are paradoxical and oxymoronic. There is nothing to be done about it. You may have to be of a certain age to find aptness in an idea like bittersweet. Baptisms, weddings, graduations, anniversaries and funerals conflate tearful, consequential, eloquent, humdrum, hilarious and frightening sensations into the proceedings. It’s a way to cope.

As I was working the elliptical trainer today and the local classical station was presenting a dissonant rondo for broken cello and neglected piano, my mind wandered to the presentation we heard last Thursday. It was Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto in C Minor.

What I know about musical literature will fit in your eye. Nevertheless, in this piece Mozart was up to something -- something both impish and brilliant. The piano, the oboe and the bassoon wage a weighty squabble. To be sure the flute, the strings, timpani and horns offer up colorful insights, but this argument – the conundrum under consideration -- was one of parts and paradoxes. I don’t have the foggiest what all the fuss was about. I trust it was more important than, say, a bar bet. Yet, we’ll hasten to add, it was deeply satisfying.

We were all coping quite nicely, thank you.

Much Love,

Poppy